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Waking up
Next to you,
Is the most beautiful
Part of the day.
As I hold
You little palm
With my
Rough with age hands
They hide within them
Just as you hide
Your being in me
When I come back
From cities far away,
Just as you some years back
You were hidden
In the two fair palms
Which cupped
My weary palms
With distinct
cigarette marks on them
On an October day
At the Coffee house
In a sleepy town.
I hold those tiny hands
Of you
Adorned by
A faux watch shaped
Like a butterfly,
That is so like your soul
Ready to scout all the flowers of this world,
And smile-
As a tree
Leans on its leave
For its very existence.
- 24-02-2014 - A Sunday Morning Blessed by you

Two blasts happened in Hyderabad, one foiled, last week. Cacophony rose on the television and the theatre of absurd is ready for a play, a whole new season. Reasons and explanation are being deliberated over the deaths, now crossed sixteen.

There is something strange about what we call a national conscience, if there is one such thing to go by that name. It gets shaken and outraged over some things while sleeps unperturbed with an unburdened soul regarding others of similar or even gruesome matters. The very next day a report of the death of six policemen in Maoist attack came in apologetically in the back pages of the newspaper, ashamed perhaps at relative public apathy. Having just finished Kurt Vonnegut's 'Fates Worse Than Death', I was wondering why one death is different from other. He used the argument in the context of death by nuclear attack. But the question easily can be posed in any other context, to no valid response or argument or explanation.

Fatherhood is not a biological accident. It isn't about a winning swimmer, it is also not about being a source of money and food and object. It is not a proud proclamation of your manhood. There is nothing incidental about being a father. Being a father is a thoughtful and conscious decision. It is a decision to love, to protect, to comfort, to be the buoyant wind beneath soaring dreams. It is a selfish decision to lose the self, and to seek the purpose of life in someone else's goals. It is not a default outcome of an arbitrary natural process. It is the choice a man makes, when he decides to reach out to divinity, by surrendering his own mortality, by lighting the candle of his life, to enlighten the dark alleys of life for his progeny.

It would be preposterous though it is extremely common to put oneself on a pedestal for the reason of having given birth to a child. That in itself is the most accidental win, no one can claim actual fame or praise on that account.

There were some unusual things
which happened this week. First the most pleasant, the weather, fast receding
winters, was held in the course by the sudden, uncertain rains. There is
always something therapeutic, something pleasantly nostalgic about rains. It provokes thinking, which it did amply. I thought so much about so many things that I lost the sense of what I was thinking. Then there was something called “A Billion
Rising” to protest against the suppression of the women folks and the put forth
the argument, an absolute one, for the equality and freedom of women across the
globe, marked by impromptu dances, congregation of women and gender-rights
activists and debates and speeches, the high point of the week gone by. The
news of the brutality meted with on a six year old girl on the
city borders of National capital of India sneaking in to the dailies as a small column, was not much impacted
by the high profile protests on the streets of the country and the world. A man
convicte…

Book Review- The Seeds of WarWriter- Ashok K BankerPublisher- Westland BooksMy Rating- 4.5/ 5 ( highly readable, recommended)It isn't not easy for an author or any artist, for that matter to surpass his or her earlier acclaimed work. The sword of his own success looms ominously over his subsequent work. Ashok Banker with his new book, "The Seeds of War" ran with this challenge. The tension is much real as was proposed by the noted author Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Love, Pray on her much loved lecture on TED. Any writer embarking on a series of story inevitably runs this risk. It is easy to imagine the worries that must be tugging at Ashok Banker's heart when he would have set himself on the task of writing the second of Mahabharata series. It is unnerving even for the reader who picks another book of an author whose earlier book one has loved, and I did pick this book with great fear and trepidation. Ashok Banker sure deserves blatant praise for having surpassed his …

I am currently reading Letters by Kurt Vonnegut. It is an amazing collection of letters, loaded splendid wit and amazingly disarming honesty. I have been off and on worrying about the dying art of letter writing, in spurts. Last I went into bout of sadness about the fact that no one writes letter anymore was when I had heard the rendition of the letters of Ghalib, the great Urdu poet, in the magnetic and soulful voice of an equally great Urdu writer, poet of the day, Gulzaar. What imagery, what honesty, wrapped in such shiny, twinkling couplets like " Jamaa karate ho kyun, raqeebon ko/ yeh tamaasha hua, gilaa Naa hua" (Translation- The way you gather those who strive and compete with me for your love to listen to the woes of our love/ Turns what would be Otherwise a plateful banter Between two lovers Into a vulgar spectacle) The visual description and verbal imagery transports you into a different world, when you read and imagine Ghalib writing about the rains in Delhi, stating, …

I remember with fondness, a time when I was six years old. I was travelling with my mother in Bihar when she and all the famous fives of them(Five sisters, my mother and her sisters, my Maasis), boarded the wrong train. Those were the times of tight purses, and strict expenses. Thus as we had it, we could understand the blunder which was committed, only after journeying in the direction opposite to the one originally planned for. By the time, trains were swapped and new tickets were bought, the funds touched the bottom lining of the purses they carried. As we rode back to Munger, the hawkers came into the train compartments with loaded temptations. Ah, those were wonderful times of great snacks selling with lovely sounds inviting you to buy the stuff, against the chugging sound of the diesel trains. One hawker, I remember, was selling eggs, the boiled one. I asked for one, and he stood there. I asked my mother more, then I begged and I do not remember well, but I may have, rolled on t…

The social media has brought in great changes in the way we live our lives. It has touched the way we shop, the way we connect to the people around us, the way we think. We no longer drive to our friends to have tea with him and talk to him or her, rather we poke ( not a nice word, I think) each other. These are the changes brought in to our lives by all pervasive social media, but that is not what I wanted to talk about. I have been thinking about the impact social media is making with respect to the causes which we follow as masses and the impact of social media on it.

The twitter, Facebook pages and now, the cause pages has made it much easy for us to pursue a cause. It is easy to pursue, easy to get angry and as violent as the non availability of physical media could permit on the Internet. It is at the same time as addictive. We closes the twitter at night with anger and wake up in the morning, all charged up with renewed fury, scouting for the latest annoyance to get furious abo…